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For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

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Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#141

Post by runnerup »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #131
andrewstuart wrote: post #111

Home schooling is a real burden on many parents who aren't professional teachers of course and are pulled in many directions. One of the most exciting emerging trends in home schooling is to pool the resources of multiple home schooling parents. It's simply not practical for parents to commit all the hours needed for full time home schooling 9 till 3:30PM every day. So home schooling parents can team up and share the…

The biggest problem with the setup you outlined is that the central government has no say in what is being taught to kids. So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.

That depends on the state[0]. West Virginia appears to be the strictest, requiring homeschooled students to score above the median public school standardized assessment score.

0: https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/current-policy...

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#142

Post by lo_zamoyski »

ericbarrett wrote: post #104
cpursley wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not even a homeschooling proponent or religious but this sounds like nonsense.

I was homeschooled and avoidance of "worldly" topics like evolution and (very basic) sex education were at the core of it. I was literally taught that dinosaur bones were planted in the soil by Satan to deceive people about the age of the world.

This is anecdotal fallacy if the intent is to suggest homeschooling is suspect because such cases do occur. You can find equally strange cases in public schools.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#143

Post by patmcc »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #125
cogman10 wrote: post #76

[flagged]

> My main issue with homeschooling is mostly around the fact that it's generally done so parents can control and limit children's access to well accepted facts (such as evolution, age of the earth, or dinosaurs). What is the problem with that? I am not aware of anything in the daily life that is dependent on the existence of macroevolution, the age of earth, or the history of dinosaurs. So, I really deeply from my he…

I think there's an argument that not knowing anything about, say, dinosaurs, is probably fine. But "knowing" very wrong things about the age of the earth or evolution being real can lead to people making decisions that are terrible for everyone. Think antibiotic resistant bacteria as a simple example. And there's a real cost to society if there's some fraction of society that don't believe climate change could possible be real.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#144

Post by woodruffw »

rayiner wrote: post #124
woodruffw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeschooling is, to a first approximation, the most individualistic approach to a child's education possible. If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city. That's what the last ~200 years of American immigrants and children of immigrants have more or less done.

> Homeschooling is, to a first approximation, the most individualistic approach to a child's education possible. In a superficial way, sure. The dominant American culture is intensely individualist. So if you don’t want your kids to grow up that way, you need to buck conformity in that narrow sense. > If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd th…

I'm not convinced. The historical argument made by homeschooling advocates is the exact opposite of the one that you're making now: that public schools excessively emphasize conformity (and the interests of the public rather than familial sphere) at the cost of each child's individuality.

> The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.

This is a pundit's warped idea of what a public school looks like. I was in a public high school not too long ago (one that was and is 60% first-generation Americans), and never at any point did I get the sense (or to this day feel) like my education was intended to make me feel asymmetrically entitled.

And again: there's a sense in which this is far more true for private and home schooling, where the entire point is to eliminate the mutual network of obligations that exist between students, their parents, and the public's interest in favor of private, religious, or sectarian interests.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#145

Post by Justsignedup »

tbrownaw wrote: post #133
Justsignedup wrote: post #70

This is giving me the worst of vibes: - options for people who don't want to expose their children to out-of-family ideas, to perpetuate family biases - a completely unregulated market for children to go to a "school" with a few other kids, giving them small classrooms, BUT, no teacher with specialization or educational background. Would be extremely hit or miss, with little resource if it isn't working out. - only f…

Problem: nobody wants what I'm selling. Solution: do some market research and improve my stuff? Nah, just make all the alternatives illegal. . Also, um, "force people to be activists and help fix things" probably requires actually listening to those people. As opposed to doing things like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Boards_Assoc...

Nono, I do not advocate for a national association for schooling, similar to what we have today. I only advocate to force all people regardless of income, and living area, to have no choice in what school their child is sent to. That could mean distance, that could mean a lot of things. But basically we need to prevent rich kids from going to rich kids schools, and poor kids from going to poor kids schools. EVERYTHING ELSE will correct itself quickly, because when the rich want shit done, it gets done.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#146

Post by cogman10 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #125
cogman10 wrote: post #76

[flagged]

> My main issue with homeschooling is mostly around the fact that it's generally done so parents can control and limit children's access to well accepted facts (such as evolution, age of the earth, or dinosaurs). What is the problem with that? I am not aware of anything in the daily life that is dependent on the existence of macroevolution, the age of earth, or the history of dinosaurs. So, I really deeply from my he…

I just have a problem with parents closing doors for their kids. A lot of early education is about kids finding their interests and passions. It's also about making for a well rounded society.

I don't care so much of a kid is like "I hate this dinosaur garbage" or whatever, but I feel awful for the kid that could have been a great paleontologist or biologist only to have that opportunity snuffed.

Sort of the same reason I'd hate for the kids to never be able to read. Sure, maybe there are jobs and people that live full lives never really needing to read anything. However, so much of the world is completely closed off to an illiterate person.

It's not that I'm trying to be a missionary per say, but rather that I believe that sparking knowledge in people is pretty much always a good thing.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#147

Post by lo_zamoyski »

rayiner wrote: post #80
cogman10 wrote: post #76

[flagged]

I think that's a lazy take. It's not the facts, it's the worldview. Socializing children into your moral and religious worldview is something that's widely recognized as a human right: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... ("The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral e…

[flagged]

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#148

Post by sho_hn »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #138
Hayvok wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We homeschool our four children, are religious, most of our friends homeschool, and this is nonsense. We love the schedule flexibility of homeschooling, the ability to let our kids explore their own interests more, and most of all - we just love being with our kids and they get to have their siblings and parents all day. > That's because teaching kids is super hard and real easy to mess up. Forgive me, but this is ju…

[flagged]

Is this maybe the problem to address, then?

Reading this from outeide the US, it's bizarre to me that people don't want a professional, trained teacher who can do a better job than they could.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#149

Post by Libcat99 »

tomp wrote: post #58
zerbinxx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One good thing about the rigid institutional environment, for better or worse, is that having exposure to that rigidity and institutional side of things can at least give kids some skills in the long run for navigating the anti-human organizations that form so much of our public and private sectors.

Almost all other societal structures are way less rigid and tyrannical. Name another institution where inmates have to ask for permission to go to the toilet, besides school and jail . Edit: or another institution where people can attack you and you can’t call police to help you.

Many, many workplaces keep a close eye on when you use the restroom, for how long, and who else is at the same time.

It's disturbingly common.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#150

Post by gemstones »

jawns wrote: post #2

We are in our ninth year of homeschooling. My wife and I attended private and public schools and grew up with typical biases against homeschooling, e.g. they lack social skills. When we got married, we always assumed we'd send our kids to traditional schools. What we learned, though, is that homeschooling has changed since we were in school. Back then, it was a niche, and the sort of parents who chose to homeschool u…

As a homeschooled kid:

Be warned that I heard “homeschooling has changed since we were in school” in the early 2000s, from multiple parents who are now estranged from their adult children.

It hasn’t really changed that much - it’s just something parents like to tell themselves to avoid thinking about the experiences their children are missing.

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